'Shady' Porn Site Practices Put Visitors at Risk

Visitors to porn sites are at serious risk of being exploited by cyber criminals, a study has suggested. It found that many sites harboured malware or used "shady" practices to squeeze money out of their visitors.

By creating their own porn sites researchers found that many consumers were vulnerable to known bugs and vulnerabilities.

Competition among porn sites makes the online adult industry ripe for abuse by hi-tech criminals, according to BBC News.

"They have almost inadvertently created a whole ecosystem that's easy to abuse for cyber crime on a large scale," said Dr Gilbert Wondracek, a computer security expert from the International Secure System Lab, which led the study.

Dr Wondracek said the team embarked on the study to find out the truth of the widely held view that porn sites are dangerous to visit. "There are studies looking at the profitability and economics of the industry but we are the first to come at it from a security and more technical point of view," he said.

Statistics suggest that approximately 12% of all websites offer pornography of one sort or another and that 70% of men under 24 browse these sites.

As a first step the researchers trawled pornographic sites to classify what they found and how the industry was structured. The big distinction was between free sites and those that charge for access. Typically pay sites produce content they give to free sites to drum up traffic.

More than 90% of the 35,000 pornographic domains analysed in the study were free sites.

The researchers analysed the 269,000 websites hosted on the 35,000 domains to see which hosted malicious software. About 3.23% of these sites were booby-trapped with adware, spyware and viruses.

Many others used "shady" practices to keep visitors onsite. These included javascript catchers that made it hard for people to leave a page. Others use scripts that re-direct visitors so when they click on a link they do not see the video or image they were expecting but are passed to an affiliate site.